It is once again time for our weekly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Scott Alexander posted a link to a Proceedings article advocating privateering in a war with China earlier this week. Much interesting discussion ensued, and John Schilling and I were highlighted in a follow-up post.

DSL is also doing its monthly effortpost contest, which wraps up Monday. Lots of good entries this time.

2018 overhauls are Battleship Propulsion parts one, two, three and four, Strike Warfare and Sea Story - Late Night Forward Pumproom Test. 2019 overhauls are Museum Review - Singapore, Commercial Aviation Part 8, A Brief History of the Cruiser, the North Carolina Class, Pictures - Iowa Engine Room and The Spanish-American War Part 2. 2020 overhauls are The Range of a Carrier Wing - An Experiment, Pictures - Iowa Enlisted Mess and Merchant Ships Introduction and Passenger Vessels.

The US Navy first took a ballistic missile to sea in 1947, when it fired a V-2 from the deck of the carrier Midway. But interest dried up quickly, as the US focused on aircraft as the main nuclear delivery platforms. To back these up, the Navy planned to use cruise missiles like Regulus instead of ballistic weapons. This began to change in the early 50s. The invention of the hydrogen bomb gave missile designers a warhead that could compensate for the inaccuracy of the weapon, and improvements in inertial navigation systems meant that missile accuracy improved significantly. The Navy was initially divided on the idea, with many fearful of the impact of such an expensive system on shipbuilding budgets, and little work was done until Admiral Arleigh Burke took office as Chief of Naval Operations in 1955.

A V-2 is fired from Midway

Burke was a strong proponent of the sea-based ballistic missile, but despite his swift actions on taking office, he was faced with a problem. Ballistic missiles had just been given the highest national priority, thanks to the work of the Killian Committee, which had laid the foundations of what became Mutually Assured Destruction. To limit competition in the new field, only four missile programs were to be authorized, and the limit had already been reached, with the Air Force's Atlas and Titan ICBMs and Thor Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM), and the Army's Jupiter IRBM, under development by Warner von Braun's team in Huntsville. If the Navy was going to get missiles to sea any time soon, it would need a partner. The Air Force, unhappy with the changes required to make Thor adaptable to maritime use, turned them down, while the Army, seeking to break the Air Force monopoly on ballistic missiles, agreed to the partnership in November 1955. Read more...

Today, submarine-launched ballistic missiles form the backbone of the great power's nuclear deterrents. Nuclear submarines loaded with long-range weapons prowl below the waves, almost undetectable and ready to strike back, even if the homeland is destroyed. But while this state of affairs seems normal today, getting here required overcoming formidable challenges. Creating a land-based ballistic missile was difficult enough, but to take the system to sea opened up a whole new set of challenges.

A Soviet Golf class ballistic missile submarine

The biggest of these is guidance. Because ballistic missiles are fired at targets hundreds or thousands of miles away, the submarine needs to be able to locate itself precisely at all times, without giving away its position. Any inaccuracies in position translate directly to errors in the missile's point of impact. The missile itself is also a complex machine loaded with explosives and dangerous fuel, and the submarine needs to be able to support it and then launch it if the time comes. Launch is made more difficult by the fact that the platform is rolling, pitching, and probably underwater. But all of these problems were overcome in the late 50s and early 60s, and for the last half-century, SLBMs have been a leading guarantor of peace. Read more...

Things continue to go well as France expands into space. We've finished adding Oxygen to Luna, and have begun to pump out water, which is the final step to make that body fully habitable. Steps have also been taken to alleviate the upcoming mineral shortages by establishing an automated mining colony on Gonggong in the outer solar system. We have new armor tech available, although it probably won't be rolled out for a few years to operational ships, and we've ordered development of an improved version of the Dogmatix AMM, which we'll put into production to boost our missile stocks.

Our biggest concern at this point is that Earth's stocks of minerals are starting to run low. In most cases, our already-mined stockpile is quite large, but we do need to start finding other sources. Ophiuchus Primere and the new colony on Gliese 892 are both rich in minerals, but availability in most cases is quite low, limiting output. We're also finding ourselves short on long-range transport. As a result, two additional AKXs were ordered and delivered last year, and we've just laid down two more. The last issue is that we seem to have overtaxed our maintenance base, and I've ordered more facilities, and research to make our existing facilities more efficient.

Database is here.

1972 has been played, and the maintenance issue has been resolved. I threw an extra lab at the relevant researcher, and we now have capacity for all our ships, and a bit to spare. Still building maintenance facilities to give us some margin, though. More AKXs finished, and I'm moving more equipment out to our colonies, focusing mostly on mines right now. We've also cut the colony cost on Luna by about 15% thanks to the water the terraforming system has been pouring out.

Database is here.

Although the German Zeppelins get the majority of attention, they were far from the only naval airships used during WWI. The British, after being burned by Mayfly, switched their efforts to non-rigid airships, which are held in shape by gas pressure. The first was bought before WWI, but most effort was focused on heavier-than-air craft. When war broke out, there was an immediate need for longer-duration surveillance than airplanes could achieve, and the first SS class blimp¹ was created by hanging the fuselage of a BE.2 airplane beneath the envelope from an earlier airship. 59 more followed, 14 of which went to France and Italy, each with a crew of two and the capability to carry 160 lb of bombs. They proved very effective as escorts for coastal convoys, able to stay in the air for up to 12 hours. None were able to successfully sink a U-boat, but they were invaluable for spotting them closing in and vectoring in the escort. U-boats were obviously reluctant to surface when airships were nearby, and from mid-1915 onward, only two ships were sunk in convoys protected by airship.

An SS class blimp

But the SS class, which eventually totaled 158 airships in a number of variants, was an extremely simple and short-range design, and work soon began on several other types with greater payload and more range and endurance.² The first was the C or Coastal class, which had a unique 3-lobed balloon, a crew of 5, and the ability to sustain 45 kts for 11 hours. While it did have the ability to carry several bombs, it was still intended primarily as a scout, which required a precise knowledge of its position for communication with surface ships. This was accomplished by a network of shore direction-finding stations, who would triangulate on the callsign of the airship and transmit its position back to it. The increased range also took them within reach of German fighters from time to time, and machine guns were installed, including a position on top of the gasbag, accessed through a tunnel in the bag.³ An improved version, known as the C star, was developed to replace the C class as they wore out. To give them a serious anti-submarine capability, plans were made to fit them with hydrophones that could be lowered from a hover⁴ and circling torpedoes set to run at periscope depth, but this was overly ambitious, and nothing came of it. Read more...

Today is the 78th anniversary of Iowa's first commissioning, at New York Navy Yard.

Military procurement is a weird field. Particularly in western countries, systems are ultimately bought by a group of people who are selected by a process having nothing to do with military expertise.⁵ Often, those charged with asking for systems take advantage of their confusion, with hilarious results. The most obvious examples of these can be found in what systems are called, which can greatly affect the chances of getting funding.

Super Hornets and legacy Hornets fly together

The most obvious dodge is to sell a system as an upgrade of an existing one, when in practice it's a new system that looks a lot like the old one and has the same name. The best example of this is the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, which was sold to Congress as an evolved version of the F/A-18C/D Hornet in the early 90s. In practice, it was an entirely new aircraft, 4' longer and weighing 30% more. It just looks a lot like the legacy Hornet, which was enough to fool Congress and get the Navy an aircraft it desperately needed to revitalize the carrier strike force for the 21st century. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread.

I recently finished an interesting book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia. It's a look at the various communities that have dotted the shores of the Med throughout history, and how they used that sea to communicate. Heavy on commerce and sketches of life, rather light on battles and naval power, but still very interesting for a wider look at maritime power.

2018 overhauls are Amphibious Warfare parts two, three and four, Why Military Acquisition is So Hard, Classes and Dreadnought. 2019 overhauls are Rangekeeping Part 1, Commercial Aviation Part 7, Falklands Part 11, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Construction Part 1, Pictures - Iowa Boiler Room and German Guided Bombs Part 2. And 2020 overhauls are Aerial Cruise Missiles, Southern Commerce Raiding Part 1 and the Proximity Fuze Parts one and two.

Most of the naval propulsion systems developed in the aftermath of WWII were intended to replace steam, which had dominated the field for a century. But one alternative was intended not to replace steam, but to generate it using a different heat source. Instead of buring coal or oil, Uranium atoms would be split, giving vast quantities of heat without the need for fuel or oxygen.

Hyman Rickover

Independence from oxygen made nuclear propulsion particularly attractive for submarines, who had been searching for ways to get greater underwater endurance than was possible on batteries. A number of methods had been tested, but results had ranged from "unsuccessful" to "ludicrously dangerous".⁶ The Navy put together a small team in 1946 to begin work on power reactors, led by an engineering officer by the name of Hyman Rickover. It proved to be an inspired choice. Rickover was a difficult man, prone to screaming at subordinates and more than a little obsessive, but also supremely effective at getting things done. He managed to set up an organization known as Naval Reactors under the joint control of the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which allowed him to evade many of the Navy's bureaucratic obstacles. Read more...

I've previously discussed the use of steam, diesel and gas turbines for warship propulsion. During these discussions, I've mentioned benefits and drawbacks to each, and the obvious way to deal with this is to combine them, an option I've mentioned several times. Today, such combination plants are nearly universal, and it's time to take a closer look at the various ways that different propulsion systems have been made to work together.

HMS Kent, an early COSAG ship

As there are a lot of these, it's first worth looking at the standard nomenclature used to describe them. All combination plants have a specific acronym, which starts with CO for "Combined", followed by a series of letters based on what sort of systems are being combined and how they are combined. For instance, many warships from around 1960 used a steam plant for cruising and added gas turbines for boost power, and their plants are described as Combined Steam And Gas, COSAG. Later, it became common to use one set of turbines for cruising, and take them offline when more speed was needed in favor of a second, more powerful, set of turbines, a system known as Combined Gas Or Gas, COGOG. If the same thing was done with diesels in place of the cruising turbines, it would be known as CODOG, or if both systems could work together, CODAG. Read more...